After-Birth Abortion & The Echo Chamber

William Saletan has a piece on Slate today talking about how the Internet echo chamber made a two-year-old piece he wrote about “after-birth abortion” seem like breaking news. Turns out I was one of the prime movers in this event. I didn’t do it on purpose. Somebody on my Facebook feed sent a link out, and I read the story without looking at the date. I reasoned — faultily — that this must be a New Thing because I had never heard of it. I blogged it without looking at the date at the top of the story. I honestly thought it was new. I apologize for sending out old news, but it was a mistake, not an intent to deceive.

I notice that this happens a lot on Facebook and in my Twitter feed: people sending out old news as if it were brand new. Slate, being Slate, denounces the Saletan story rehash that I and other conservative bloggers and journalists started up as an example of the “right-wing echo chamber” at work, and they’re half right. But I get almost as many left-wing echo chamber posts on Twitter and FB, not, I suspect, from liberals trying to start trouble, but from liberals who honestly believe that what they’re sending out is fresh news, because it’s the first time they’ve heard of it.

Bottom line: all of us have to do a better job of checking the dates on these stories before we post them. I’ll do better on this. What Saletan observes here is an unfortunate thing, but it’s not a right-wing media conspiracy; it’s just carelessness and the pressure to pass on information without checking it out. Many of us are guilty of this. The after-birth abortion story is still outrageous, but the fact that it was reported two years ago and nothing much came of the proposal it discussed significantly diminishes its heat. Had I known it was two years old, I wouldn’t have put it on the blog — not because it’s any less offensive a concept, but because it was nothing new.

UPDATE: I should have pointed out that Saletan himself is even-handed in the piece, saying that he sees this dynamic on the Left too. It was a Slate copy editor (presumably) who inserted the headline crediting the “right-wing echo chamber” with this effect.

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28 Responses to After-Birth Abortion & The Echo Chamber

Yes. We should all be more careful. But don’t be so sure that Slate isn’t partly to “blame.” I have seen this article quite a few times recently. And I believe I have seen it at Slate. I think they must have a section for “most viewed” or “most e-mailed” or some such. So someone launched it and Slate started featuring it prominently on the site.

“If you think this disease is confined to the right, you’re kidding yourself. Every day, I see it on the left. I see it at Slate. I see it among people who think they’re enlightened and critically astute. We’re reading and writing faster than we can think. When you do that, you’re not using the Internet anymore. It’s using you.”

Saletan at the end of writes: “If you think this disease is confined to the right, you’re kidding yourself. Every day, I see it on the left. I see it at Slate. I see it among people who think they’re enlightened and critically astute. We’re reading and writing faster than we can think. When you do that, you’re not using the Internet anymore. It’s using you.”

I think not only misrepresent his piece from 2012, you are misrepresenting what he wrote today as some sort of slam on the right.

[nfr: nope. I appreciate the clarification, but a Slate headline or cut line writer characterized thus as the “right-wing echo chamber”at work. Writers typically don’t write their own headlines. This obviously wasn’t saletan’s mistake. Amusingly, the headline or cut line an editor assigned to this essay exemplifies the problem. — rd]

“Bottom line: all of us have to do a better job of checking the dates on these stories before we post them.”

Agreed, just like I check Snopes.com before I ever forward one of those e-mails I periodically get reporting some “completely outrageous” thing that the feds/state/liberals/conservatives/college professors have done.

As any good historian, I have not the slightest objection to treating 4000 year old events as breaking news.
So what’s wrong with 2 years?
Have the authors of this wicked suggestion been shipped out to North Korea?

“On Monday morning, it started to show up in the blogs of conservative writers who directly or indirectly follow them: Rod Dreher at the American Conservative, Robert George at Mirror of Justice, and later, Ramesh Ponnuru at National Review. Full disclosure: I love these guys. Every Friday night, we get together to eat fish, play poker, and subvert reproductive freedom…The blog posts said nice things about me (for that, I’m bringing the wine and crackers next Friday)”

Hey Rod, assuming you guys alternate whose place you play at every week, can I get an invite the next time Robert George hosts it in New York?

it’s just carelessness and the pressure to pass on information without checking it out.

Who put the pressure on you that led you to post about the story without checking it out?

[NFR: I did. So many of us are so busy blogging, tweeting, facebooking, e-mailing, etc., that we don’t check out the dates on these things. Saletan is a respected, reliable writer, and it’s not like I posted something that was untrue. The problem was that it was two years old — a minor sin, but the thing got repeated as if it were brand-new. Is it any less outrageous for being two years old? No — but as I said, I wouldn’t have blogged about it if I had noticed that it was old news. Some stories on various sites feature the current date, even if the article is old, though that isn’t the case with Slate. Anyway, nobody in the office is telling me, “Blog on this! Blog on it now!” That’s just my nature. Again, I treat this blog as a notebook, and often post things that I don’t have an opinion on, or that I do have an opinion on, but it’s not strongly held, ergo I’m interested to hear what you all think so I can figure out what I think. That’s not the case with the Saletan article, though; that was simply, “Omigod, can you believe what they’re up to now?!” Again, I get these articles every single day on my FB and Twitter feed, from left and right. It’s all about confirmation bias, I think. — RD]

Skipping over the fact that folks cannot post/repost in real time on the Internet. Why can’t folks find an intelligent way to discuss the “end date” for abortion? Various Internet news accounts have said the teenage brain does not mature until the person is 20 something. Why note then settle on an “abortion age” of 20? That might let parents make an informed decision. Why should passage through a distended vagina or a surgical incision matter? Passage through a vagina sats nothing about the intrinsic worth of the fetus to be aborted. Lets just call anyone up to what we conventionally call age 20 a fetus and pemit abortion anytime before 21.

“all of us have to do a better job of checking the dates on these stories before we post them.”

part of the problem lies with the fact that online media does not prominently display the date of an article. Besides what date do you want? the date it was uploaded to the web? something that drives crazy when looking for a WSJ article only to realize that the date was the day before. also need to check the timestamp too.
or the date it was actually published?

The Web is only going to get weirder as it gets older. New information inevitably renders some older information false, but now searches on the topic relating to this information will turn up both correct and incorrect results. So both the correct and incorrect information propagates. Getting rid of the errors will be like playing a game of whack-a-mole that gets bigger over time.

It reminds me of the truth maintenance problem in expert systems. Basically your conclusions are often invalidated by information that revises older information, but now you need to track down all the wrong conclusions inferred from the incorrect information.

tl:dr At some point we’re going to need Internet 2.0 and only copy the stuff that is known to be correct.

I think most of us made the same mistake you did. We followed the article and read what we believed to be an interesting article without even looking at the date it was written. I certainly didn’t. Perhaps we should all pay more attention to the date on these articles.

That said, I would have no problem with its reporting and Mr Saleton, whose thinking I also like, should have no problem seeing it or any piece reposted as long as it is presented as an article from the past. Saleton’s piece, as well as the journal article he was critiquing, are as intellectually stimulating now as they were then, particularly for those of us who never read it the first time.

That was a nice observation by Saletan. That is, how the propagation of news/articles works on the internet, and how it end up in something misleading, and therefore can be used to deceive people (actually, where I live it IS used to deceive, in a quite aggressive manner), so our sources (either on the left or the right) must be trustworthy and thoughtful.
But as to the question of the time, I tend to agree with the commentator HeartRight. If the proponents of the idea did not repent its still worthy to be answered/rebuked/laughed at – whatever the appropriate response would be to this ignoble idea. Besides, one should not be consoled that in two years it did not gained momentum; generally these crazy ideas (even ones that are real today) are generated in the academia, the elite circles, the literature, etc., only to gain more political influence some decades later.

I think you are indeed correct. I get very weary of sending my friends documentation that their current outrage is manufactured. Having said that, I would also note that the number of right-wing nonsense that I have to refute is much, much greater than any left-wing nonsense. The number of websites that cater to right-wing conspiracy types dwarfs any liberal equivalents.

“I did. So many of us are so busy blogging, tweeting, facebooking, e-mailing, etc….”

The dark side of social media and the internet is how our ability to careful read, synthesize, and evaluate what we read has been declining. Information is so readily available but it tends not to be evaluated in a reflective manner. Look at the deeply flawed Regnerus study that lit up the right wing blogosphere like wildfire. People who were not social scientists and who lacked the background to evaluate the study started babbling on about it before the normal debates could occur in the scientific literature where they belong. This is especially true for issues that are politicized. Even Ross Douthat in the NYT editorialized about the study despite the fact that he lacks the background to evaluate social science research. Ultimately, an enormous amount of egg got left on a large number of faces over that issue. There is something about this new electronic world and the 24 hour news cycle that leads members of the chattering classes to set aside their critical thinking and reflective abilities.

I think this says something about the meaninglessness of “outrage”. If this were an actual outrage, wouldn’t you have remembered it?

[NFR: Dude, I’m outraged at least once a day, sometimes twice before lunch. And I forget my anger before bedtime. I can’t remember who or what to be mad at. Maybe it’s a bug, maybe it’s a feature, I dunno. — RD]

Why does it matter? The apostles of afterbirth abortion deserve to be mocked eternally. there is no statute of limitations on evil and stupidity. I don’t really care exactly when Guiblini and what’s his name wrote their execrable oeuvre.

No, Saletan was not “being Slate,” and he was not “half right” when he pointed to the right-wing echo chamber. He was completely right, because he says this in his final paragraph:

If you think this disease is confined to the right, you’re kidding yourself. Every day, I see it on the left. I see it at Slate. I see it among people who think they’re enlightened and critically astute.

Saletan is one of the fairest and most honest columnists out there. (I wish the right had someone like him covering that beat!) That’s why I was surprised when Rod gave the impression here that Saletan was criticizing only the right. That didn’t sound like Saletan – and it wasn’t.

So – to peel another layer off this onion – just what is so outrageous about what was merely an academic thought experiment in the first place?

Should people not write about such things in an academic setting? Should ‘outrageous’ thought experiments not be published?

And to my way of thinking, the answer to the thought experiment was obvious – after birth, the child acquires full legal standing and the issues the mother might have do not override that standing because someone else besides the mother can provide for the needs of the child.

I am unclear what the mistake is here. Certainly regurgitating an article to discuss its content isn’t a mistake.

I just received my copy of duty. No doubt when I finally shut down and read it. There will information that is old. If it is relevent, next week, next month, next year or twenty years from now I would reference it.

The fact that you neglected to reference the article’s age is a minor oversight.

Killing children in the womb is always a relevant issue. Liberals do stop advocating that anyone should be killing children in or out of the womb.

While it was a mistake, what was the real problem with the mistake? Why is the fact that the article is 2 years old make commentary on it any more or less valuable?

“I get very weary of sending my friends documentation that their current outrage is manufactured.”

But the outrage isn’t ‘manufactured,’ is it? Its just dated. Or has Saleton denounced the article? Was it not accurately quoted? Is it simply that the article got attention later than he preferred, or has something changed about the issue that makes it no longer relevant?

Dude, I’m outraged at least once a day, sometimes twice before lunch. And I forget my anger before bedtime.

If I may say so, that is an essential foundation of civilized living. If we stayed outraged all the time, half of us would be pushing up daisies.

Elite: Nobody advocates killing children… what we’re debating is when the fetus becomes a child. That we can even have a civilized debate, when half of us are saying “This is a child” and the other half are saying “No its not, just an internal growth,” is a credit to our good breeding, all of us. Scott Roeder apparently was missing something that restrains the rest of us.

I love babies. I love children. I support Roe v. Wade as a sound limit on the police powers of the state. Given the current state of medical knowledge, compared to what we knew in 1973, I think pushing the boundary back to 20 weeks would be a prudent thing to do.